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The Divine Viscera: Medicine And Religion In The Islamic Golden Age, Isabella A. Pua

Young Historians Conference

Islamic medicine is largely ignored in Western tradition, but in an era when Western European medical practice relied more on mysticism than science and had lost the advances made by Classical Greece, the Islamic Empire entered a golden age of scientific thought. The impetus for the Golden Age medicine that developed can be partially attributed to the Islamic religion itself. This paper explores the role of Islam as both a unifying force and a set of broad cultural values in creating that atmosphere that allowed for the study of medicine, within the context of the scientific-religious duality that characterized discovery …